The White Bone Read online

  Mud can’t think how to respond. Next to her, She-Scares rumbles, “Our Mud just acquired her cow name. She is now She-Spurns.”

  She-Demands seems not to hear this. To Mud she says, “You have the third eye.”

  “Yes.”

  “It will not show you your mother’s death or the death of any of your calves. Did you know that?”

  Mud did not. That she is unlikely to be shown herself is the only prohibition she has ever heard. She turns to look at She-Sees, who also has the third eye, and the old cow looks back at her and mutters, “Knowing things is only a dream of having known them.”

  Again She-Demands seems not to hear. “You might foresee the deaths of your sisters and aunts,” she continues, “your adoptive mother. I foresaw all these deaths in my own family. But you will not foresee the death of the one who gave you life or of the ones to whom you will give life, although you might be offered a glimpse of whatever it is that kills them. Two hundred and ten days ago I foresaw the Rogue’s web and the hindleggers dropping out of the belly of the roar fly. I said to myself, we must steer clear of webs. But this web was not known to me. And, in any event, it was not the web that shot us.”

  “Oh, you were shot,” Mud says. “I couldn’t see any sting holes.”

  “You envisioned the slaughter?”

  “Just as you were arriving here. I saw the lunatics and ribs, hundreds and hundreds of corpses, and then … your family. I counted twenty-three.”

  “Did you return?” She-Scares asks the She-D matriarch. Not all survivors of a slaughter return to mourn their dead.

  “The ne … xt a … fter … noon.” This from She-Drawls-And-Drawls, whose peculiar habit of stretching out each word makes it sound as if she is calling from far away. “The tusks we … re go … ne, and so … me of the fe … et.”

  She-Screams begins to weep out loud, and then all the She-S’s, even She-Snorts, even Swamp, are weeping out loud, urinating and defecating, streaming temporin. The She-D’s step aside from the commotion and are silent until She-Scares recovers herself enough to ask, “How is it that you were spared?”

  “We ran,” She-Demands says simply.

  “We ran and ran,” She-Distracts sing-songs.

  It is She-Distracts’ first utterance. There is a silence as everyone waits in case she has more to say. Instead she breaks into a mad little running-on-the-spot dance, a parody of flight, ears wide, tail out, kicking up her legs.

  “Don’t,” Hail Stones says. “Please.” He lays his trunk across her haunches, and she lowers her head and goes still. “Matriarch, I think she is overheated,” he says to She-Demands in the formal timbre.

  His voice is the musical rumble of a courteous old bull. That beautiful, that unfitting. The She-S’s now turn their attention to him, and despite the reek of his wound Mud picks up his savoury odour of fresh dung and fermenting fruit. He is eleven years old. Far too young to properly mount a cow, she thinks, and she looks at his poor foot to account for her sudden desolation.

  “Let us get ourselves under the trees,” She-Scares says.

  Both families move slowly to keep pace with Hail Stones, and in an unusual display of exertion and solicitude Swamp gives him a boost up the bank. When they reach the fever trees, She-Scares pulls down the highest branches so that everybody can browse on the bark and shrivelled leaves, and She-Demands turns to Mud again and says, “We met your birth family.”

  “The She-M’s?” She-Scares says, spreading her ears. The She-M’s have become the most secretive of herds, rarely encountered. Mud has not seen them since they left her under the gutted baobab the day after her birth. “Where?” She-Scares says.

  “At The She-Hill, coming out of the salt-lick cave. Three cows and two calves.”

  “Where were the rest?”

  She-Demands starts to peel a strip of bark. “Slaughtered,” she says.

  “Ah!” She-Scares says. She stabs her tiny tusk as if fending off humans.

  She-Demands chews and watches her.

  “Was She-Measures spared?” Mud asks anxiously.

  “She-Measures is no longer the matriarch,” She-Demands says. “She has gone dreamy.” And as if to demonstrate she shuts her eyes and seems to fall asleep. A pair of cattle egrets lands on her back, and Mud is about to speak when her eyes open and she says, “She has a message for you, Mud. Two messages. The first is, forgive her for abandoning you to your doom, but there was only one chance in four hundred and six that the muck would release you. That is the first message. The second is, indulge Me-Me the longbody. She may know where The Safe Place is.”

  “When did you meet them?” Mud asks, weeping now.

  “Fif … ty-five days a … go,” answers She-Drawls-And-Drawls.

  She-Scares says, “We are not acquainted with any longbody.”

  “Nor are we, Matriarch,” says Hail Stones. Again he uses the formal timbre.

  She-Scares looks at him. “'She may know where The Safe Place is'? What could that mean? What safe place?”

  He dips his head deferentially, as few bull calves do these days when responding to a direct question from another family’s matriarch. “The only Safe Place,” he says. He limps over to She-Demands and runs his trunk down her flank and says, “Matriarch, might I tell them?”

  An airplane passes high overhead, somewhere to the southeast, and She-Demands twists around and squints at the low sun. The plane is too far away even for Mud to see, but a haunted expression grips the matriarch’s features. Still, She-Demands has heard Hail Stones and she nods.

  “Thank you,” he says. He turns to the She-S’s. Despite the stench of his foot they move closer. “This story,” he says, “was told to us by Rancid of the She-D’s-And-D’s,* cousin to our matriarch. It concerns a magical bone called the white bone, which we call the white prize because whenever somebody speaks of it by name it loses a small portion of its power. Rancid was so worried about the white prize becoming entirely powerless that he asked us to keep the story to ourselves. But it seems to me that this is no longer the time for secrecy.”

  “You can trust in our discretion,” She-Scares says.

  “Rancid is very big and fearsome,” She-Snorts says, “is he not?” Her eyes glitter.

  “He is dead,” rumbles She-Demands, who continues to nod and look terrified.

  “Ah,” She-Scares says and tosses her head.

  “No, Matriarch,” Hail Stones says with another slight bow in her direction, “he was not slaughtered. He died two hundred days ago of a tired heart. We had heard his death rumble and found him lying in the tail grass on the banks of Long Water River. As soon as he saw our matriarch he started telling the story. He knew he was living his final hour, and as he was always very fond of our matriarch he wanted to bequeath her something that might one day be her salvation.”

  Here Hail Stones grimaces and lifts his bad foot. “Matriarch,” he says to She-Scares, “with your permission I would like to lie down.”

  “Of course,” She-Scares says.

  “I will clear a bed,” says Swamp, and in a second surprising fit of activity he kicks several stones and twigs out of the way.

  Hail Stones eases himself onto his side. Everybody forms a circle around him, and he is drenched in shade. He looks up at She-Scares. Using the formal diction he tells them this:

  The emergence of humans did not, as is widely assumed, initiate a time of darkness. On the contrary, in the first generations following the Descent, The Domain was a glorious place, and this is partly because humans back then were nothing like today’s breed. They ate flesh, yes, and they were unrepentant and wrathful, but they killed only to eat, and very few of them had a taste for she-ones. There weren’t any massacres or mutilations. There was plenitude and ease, and between she-ones and other creatures was arare communion, for (here is another little-known fact) all she-ones were mind talkers, and the minds of all creatures were intelligible.

  When the darkness did arrive, however, it was especially catastr
ophic. No rain fell for six hundred days and six hundred nights. The winds were ceaseless, and the air was thick with black dust. As water and grazing disappeared, the various species grew wary of each other, and the minds of humans, snakes and insects became impenetrable. From the minds of snakes and insects could be heard only a faint chiming. From the minds of humans came a silence so absolute and menacing that many of those who heard it forswore mind talking altogether.

  What provoked that terrible silence? It was the darkness … the darkness had entered the humans and was corrupting their already corrupt spirits. Soon they were slaughtering whole families. After devouring the flesh of their kills, they were burning the hides and pulverizing the bones and tusks. They seemed bent on annihilation, and the surviving she-ones fled to the edges of The Domain without any thought of returning to mourn their dead, since they believed that no trace of the dead remained.

  They were wrong. In the centre of a circle of boulders the rib of a newborn remained. None of the humans who passed the boulders ever spotted it, even though, over the years, it bleached to a blinding whiteness. Meanwhile it radiated toward all living creatures a quality of forgiveness and hope. But the hearts of humans were hard, and would not be pierced. Not then.

  The darkness finally lifted, the massacres eased off, andthe she-ones went back to their old ranges. Released from the miseries of the black dust, a small number of humans felt the power of the white bone. They set out to discover a place of tranquillity and permanent green browse and, when they did, declared it a safe vicinity for every creature on The Domain, including the carnivores, although they themselves were no longer of that order.

  Since then, there have been rumours of this refuge among all species, but only she-ones can be led there. What guides them is the white bone, which, in times of darkness, surfaces in various regions of The Domain, always within a circle of boulders or termite mounds to the west of whatever hills are in the region. It constantly moves about. For exactly two days and two nights (long enough for any good tracker to set a course) it stays in a family’s or individual’s possession and then vanishes to reappear within another circle of boulders or termite mounds. The deeper the darkness, the whiter it is to the eyes of she-ones. (To the eyes of other creatures it is drab and unremarkable.) Any she-one lucky enough to find it should throw it into the air, mark how it lands and be directed by its pointed end. But whoever throws it must believe in its power.

  “Otherwise,” Hail Stones says, “it will only lead the thrower in circles.” He comes to his feet.

  The She-S’s nearest him step back … awkwardly, blinking. They are dazed by what they have heard.

  “We never did learn how Rancid came by the legend,” Hail Stones says. “He died before we could ask. But we did not doubt him. With his last breath he told us that the short rains would fail to arrive and that Long Water River would migrate in its entirety, and he was right about that as well.* How he could have known is another mystery.”

  “Rancid never spoke a false word,” says She-Demands rather forcefully. Her head still nods.

  “He was truth itself,” Hail Stones says. He reaches for the old matriarch’s trunk and gently pulls on it until she stops moving.

  “Well,” She-Scares rumbles, “if Rancid predicted this drought when nobody else, not even Tall Time, smelled it coming, then I, for one, believe his story.”

  There is a rumble of agreement from the other She-S cows.

  “Although,” says She-Snorts, “it is difficult to imagine a breed of humans pierced by goodness.”

  “Even the blackest crevices have known a moment of sunlight,” observes Swamp … who occasionally makes such enticing but unfounded pronouncements.

  * The She is the mother of elephants. Rogue created all other creatures, with the exception of human beings. He is untrustworthy, mischievous and often malevolent.

  * Date Bed, daughter of She-Snorts, was born on a bed of ripe desert dates that had been shaken from a tree by Torrent, who is probably her father. (“Father,” however, is neither a concept nor a word since bulls are not thought to be co-conceivers of life. A bull digs the calf tunnel, that is all. Sometimes it is necessary for a cow to be mounted by several bulls in succession before she feels she has been “truly dug,” and it is the bull credited with having given her this feeling who is also credited with having provided a tunnel spacious enough for a calf to sprout in.)

  * They calculate the passage of time using a complicated method that takes into account the phases of the moon, the position of the sun, the cycles of rain and dryness and, most important, their diet-whether the grass is green or gold or long or short, whether they are eating primarily swamp vegetation or tree vegetation and so on. This method recognizes seasons and exact twenty-four-hour cycles as well as the breakdown of such cycles into smaller units, which are not hours or minutes. For the sake of simplicity, however, “hour,” “minute,” “moment” and “second” are resorted to throughout this narrative, as are “day” and “year.”

  * Bent was born with his foreknees tucked under his belly. For the first two days of his life he was unable to stand, and the only way he could reach the nipples of his mother, She-Soothes, was to sit on his hind legs directly under her breasts.

  * So fond is She-Soothes of her cow name that since the day it was given to her she uses it when speaking of herself, refusing to reduce it to a pronoun.

  * Dead humans are banished to a place beneath the earth known as The Fissure.

  * When a family grows overly large, one of the older cows may break away- taking her calves, grandcalves and younger sisters with her-to start a new branch of the family. In order to name itself, this branch will double the family sound. A breakaway family splitting off from a family that is already double-sounded will call itself (for example) the Second She-D’s-And-D’s. Individual cow names are occasionally doubled within a family unit if it is deemed appropriate for a young cow to be named after an older, still-living relative.

  * Inland bodies of water migrate, drop by drop, to sleep caves beyond the edge of the earth. Eventually the water awakens and leaves the caves to drift back over the earth in the form of thunderclouds. When a cloud is near the depression from which it arose, it breaks apart and spills down. (The horizon migrates inversely. During the dry season, as the air becomes increasingly dusty and the distance blurs, the horizon is sluggishly closing in. After the first rains the reinvigorated horizon departs so quickly that within two or three days the distance is once again visible.)

  Chapter Four

  Ten minutes later the same airplane that disturbed She-Demands dips low over a region of desiccated palm woodland where Tall Time has run for cover. Only when the roar has evaporated does it occur to him that he is facing the escarpment and that, as a result of this blunder, all of his bull relations will fall over. Sickened to think that he could have overlooked such a common superstition, he rumbles a series of infrasonic apologies.* He does so despite the fact that none of his bull relations is within hearing range.

  He would have known if they were, there would have been some communication. At the very least there would have been a scent, however stale. But in a hundred and ninety days he hasn’t come across a single sign or word of any member of his birth family, who are the She-B’s-And-B’s. He fears for their lives as he fears for the lives of everyone precious to him. With a terrible sense of helplessness–and without reason, since she is safe at Blood Swamp and since he is well aware that all the omens regarding her are favourable–he fears for Mud, imagining her as she was when he first laid eyes on her, timid and homely, or imagining her trying to flee a gang of humans, her withered leg slowing her down.

  It is mostly for Mud’s sake that he is not at Blood Swamp himself but fifty miles north of it looking for a certain white bone.

  During a drought the land is not wanting for bones, and to make matters worse the very existence of the white bone is in question. And yet he has undertaken the search with what some might
call his characteristic ardour. He has heard himself described as an ardent bull, prone to excessive enthusiasms and anxieties (and to singular desires and to ridiculous, archaic turns of phrase).

  Well, as his old matriarch was fond of saying, “the long-legged go to lengths.”

  He stomps his left hind foot three times, circles to the left one full revolution, stomps his left forefoot three times, and meanwhile he sings:

  Flies in the firmament,

  Creakers in the grass,

  Evil creeping close, but

  None shall let it pass,

  a song and dance that has the effect of safeguarding far-flung relations. The song alone can be of assistance to a cow of your intimate acquaintance who happens to be giving birth, although Tall Time doubts that any cow anywhere, of his acquaintance or not, is giving birth right now. Calves don’t drop from cows during droughts… .

  Tall Time himself being an exception, having arrived in the world toward the end of the last bad drought. Dry Time he might have been called, but he was born shortly after sunrise, when the shadows proclaim giants, and his mother decided upon the more imposing name. His mother was the famous singing cow, She-Bellows-And-Bellows. Even her labour cries were tuneful, even her death cries. She died only six hours after Tall Time’s birth, at “small time,” or high noon. She died for no reason, because “Thus spake the She,” so Tall Time was told and so he believed until, while still a calf, he learned of the obscure superstition that if a three-legged hyena crosses the path of a cow within a day and a night of her giving birth, that cow will be dead by the following sunrise.

  Had a three-legged hyena crossed his mother’s path?

  “No,” said his adoptive mother, She-Bluffs.

  But she often said no for yes, and he didn’t believe her. Down on his knees he begged for the truth.

  “Three-legged?” she said then. “As it happens there was a three-legged one slinking around that day.”

  He told her about the superstition. “Didn’t anybody know about it?” he asked.